Large study of Airbnb hosts hints at who is making the money

The consultancy LearnAirbnb did a study of the home sharing industry, with market data on Airbnb's 430,000 US listings and casts some fresh light.

There’s an ongoing debate about how home-sharing sites like Airbnb are performing, and a new study from LearnAirbnb, a consultancy, casts some fresh light.

LearnAirbnb did a 119-page study of the home sharing industry, with market data on 430,000 US listings — which is about a fifth of the 2 million listings that Airbnb says it has in the US.

Some of the hard data was culled by Everbooked, a price-setting service for property owners.

Here are some highlights:

1. The median listing revenue nationwide for all hosts is $3,300 a year. Three out of every four listings earn modest total rental revenues of approximately $10,000 or less in a year. (The median numbers avoid the skewing of averages that happen due to the superhosts.)

2. Four out of five Airbnb hosts have only a single listing, but in some markets, like Miami, as much as 10% have three or more listings.

3. Superhosts (people who book 10 or more trips a year) make nearly double the average revenue of regular hosts.

4. An elite of superhosts gross even more, with at least 75 US hosts identified as grossing more than $1 million in rental income per year.

5. The top 1% of highest-grossing hosts made 19% of the overall bookings revenue in the sample.

6. 29% of surveyed hosts have never been guests on Airbnb.

7. Despite what the hotel industry says, the average annual occupancy of an Airbnb property is 17.1% — far less than most hotels.

8. Shared rooms, Airbnb’s original mainstay, fare even worse — 12.4% is their average annual occupancy.

The study also includes an attitudinal survey of more than 1,300 hosts across 83 countries, done in December 2015. That survey found:

1. 59.2% of current hosts surveyed are home-sharing for supplemental income, but the number of those motivated to host for building wealth (16.9%) is growing. For 15.4%, it is a main source of income.

2. Only the newbies are worried about security and stuff getting stolen — 18.5% of prospective hosts worry about it, but only 1.6% of actual hosts do.